Presentation given at the HEA Social Sciences learning and teaching summit 'Teaching ethics: The ethics of teaching' A blog post outlining the issues discussed at the summit is available via http://bit.ly/1lndTnX

1. Teaching Ethics:
A digital scholarship perspective
Martin Weller

2. Overview
• Open scholarship
• Ethical perspective
• Ethics of obligation vs risks
• How open for students
• Open Access/Open data
• OERs
• New skills
• Learning analytics
• Conclusions

3. The Digital Scholar book
Bloomsburyacademic.com

4. Open
scholarship
Weller (2011) open scholars are likely to:
• Have a distributed online identity
• Have a central place for their identity
• Have cultivated an online network of peers
• Have developed a personal learning environment from a range of
tools
• Engage with open publishing
• Create a range of informal outputs
• Try new technologies
• Mix personal and professional outputs
• Use new technologies to support teaching and research
• Automatically create and share outputs

5. By psd http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/3717444865/
Openness is an efficient approach
Benefits in terms of:
Reuse
Cost saving
Marketing
Recruitment
Public engagement
Focus on ethical side

6. What is teaching?
• Partly enculturation
• What if that culture has changed or is less
valid?

7. Competing set of ethical
considerations
• We should be
equipping students
with skills and
approaches that
will be relevant
Learning is a
vulnerable
process & risks
associated

8. • Phonar
• DS106
• Rhizo14
• Good community
• Open approach is at heart

9. H817Open
• Create own blog
• Aggregate together
• Some did behind password
• Others felt excluded
• Forcing people into open

10. Open Access
• Anything paid for by Govt funding should be
freely available
• But what about things paid for by student
fees?
• “Publishing science behind paywalls is
immoral” (Mike Taylor)

11. Open data
• G8 treaty on open data - all
government data will be
released openly by default
• Mandates that put data with
publications
• But what about ‘human’ data?
• Deanonymising data is not
difficult
• Date of birth, gender & zip
code is unique for 87% of the
population
• Ohm: ‘Data can be either
useful or perfectly anonymous
but never both.’

12. OERs
• Is there an ethical compulsion to release
teaching content?
• Is it unethical not to expose your students to
the best content?

13. Developing appropriate skills
• Networker
• Digital identity
• Engaging with the open net
• Are the academic skills we teach still relevant?

14. Should we be teaching our students
the art of guerrilla research?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/idfonline/
5981013497/

15. “what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s
genius could be embraced by half-a-billion
people within six years of its first being
launched, without (and here is the critical
bit) asking permission of anyone. The real
story is not the invention. It is the platform
that makes the invention sing.”
(Larry Lessig)

16. The manifesto
1. It can be done by one or two researchers and
does not require a team
2. It relies on existing open data, information
and tools
3. It is fairly quick to realise
4. It is disseminated via blogs and social media
5. It doesn’t require permission

17. More ethical?
12 days for a
conventional
proposal was the
average (RCUK 2006)
ESRC - only 17% of
bids were successful in
2009-10
RCUK = 2006 £196
million on
applications to the
8 UK research
councils
2800 bids submitted to
ESRC in 2009-10, an
increase in 33% from
2005-6
ESRC - 2000 failed
bids x 12 days per
bid = 65 years of
effort

18. Learning analytics
• Can be powerful tool to support students
• Ethical element of gathering data
• Predictive analytics – should we
encourage/discourage people who have little
chance of success?

19. James Boyle:
“We are very good at seeing the downsides
and the dangers of open systems, open
production systems, networks of openness.
.. Those dangers are real… we are not so
good at seeing the benefits and the
converse holds true for the closed system.”

20. Conclusions
• New tools & approaches offer new
possibilities
• Openness is key to many of these
• But bring new ethical considerations
• Ethics in NOT adopting as well as adopting